Well, we'll have Fox for 3 more years.
As for the PAN, the current phrase is an American one, associated with Bush Sr's nightmare:
"ONE TERMERS!"
[But let me insist once again: while the loser was PAN, the true winner was not PRI, but the leftist PRD]
Would Andrés López really stand a chance in 2006? How has Mexico City changed under his administration?
If there were presidential bookies for 2006, I'd place my bet Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the mayor of Mexico City, but I guess I woudn't get a big premium.
He contends with Martha Sahagún, the President's wife, for the country's most popular politician, after Fox. He has an 88% approval rating in Mexico City. His party, PRD, now has an absolute majority in the city's legislative body: the Federal District's Legislative Assembly.
His election is far from certain. The "moral leader" of PRD, and three times losing presidential candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, wants to run again, thinking he might be the Mexican Lula. I believe that it will be harder for López Obrador to win his party nomination than to win the presidency, if he gets nominated.
I wouldn't discard -today, july 9th, 2003- that López Obrador would
run in 2006 for a small party, against Cárdenas and whomever PRI and PAN choose.
Mexico City has hardly changed during his administration, but López Obrador is shrewd.
He wakes up every morning before six a.m., holds a press conference at seven and is always in the morning news.
When the government decided to quit subsidising milk for poor families, he decided that the Mexico City administration give a one peso (10 U.S cents) subsidy for each liter of milk distributed in poor neighborhoods.
He also provided a subsidy plan for senior citizens. Every resident over 60 years old, regardless of his or her working or pension situation, or economic condition, gets a 60 dollar check "for all they have done in the past years".
He's spent a lot of money refurbishing the city's downtown, and has done some very publicized freeway enhancement work.
Basic services like street pavement, lights and trash disposal have worsened.
Security has not improved.
Debt has grown.
But the populist agenda, and the idea that the man is at least trying to do something boost his popularity.
A strange detail for Mexico: López Obrador, a very sober man, is not Catholic, like Fox and PAN, nor unreligious, like the PRI nomenklatura, nor atheist, like most of the PRD, but Protestant.
Mexico's PRI slowly regains power, many see hand of Salinas
Posted on Mon, Jul. 21, 2003
As Mexico's PRI slowly regains power, many see hand of Salinas
By Susana Hayward
Knight Ridder Newspapers
MEXICO CITY - Wary Mexicans are wondering what former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is up to after he made another surprise visit to the country he left eight years ago as a disgraced and despised leader.
He moved to Ireland and Cuba in self-imposed exile in 1995, when Mexicans blamed him for everything from corruption and economic collapse to guerrilla insurgencies and involvement in political murders.
Now, Salinas, who doesn't face any charges, appears to be preparing for a comeback. While he won't say what he's up to, observers agree he's trying to help strengthen the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI as it called by its Spanish initials, and return it to power in the 2006 presidential elections.
Salinas surprised Mexicans when he showed up July 6 to vote in national congressional elections. He grinned enigmatically as reporters demanded: Is he returning to politics?
"Mexico is and will be my home," he said, evading the question. "My future, like my present, is in the areas of reflection, of ideas, to think about steps taken, but most of all to build something, to look ahead."
The PRI was trounced in July 2000 with the election of President Vicente Fox, who ran as the head of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN. The PRI's defeat after 71 years in power was due largely to Fox's promises of social reforms. The electorate was fed up with the PRI, a political machine that ruled the country by doling out patronage.
But Fox, whose party lacks a legislative majority, hasn't delivered.
When the PRI made a comeback in Congress in this month's elections, many saw the hand of Salinas. In the 500-member Chamber of Deputies, the PRI went from 202 seats to at least 224, while Fox's party lost big, dropping from 202 seats to 148. Results in some districts are still contested, so numbers aren't final.
Salinas, 55, remains a PRI member and stalwart. In Mexico, presidents can't seek re-election after their single six-year terms, but they remain influential.
That influence was evident in April, when Salinas' daughter married in a lavish ceremony that brought out Mexico's elite businessmen, potential presidential hopefuls and ex-Cabinet members.
It was like old times.
For many, the wedding and elections were sure signals that Salinas was back and would help the PRI for the 2006 race. Salinas' critics see that as a threat to Mexico's newly invigorated democracy, particularly if he helps select a presidential candidate, which would install him as a power behind the power. Before 1999, Mexican presidents handpicked their PRI successors, who were able to gain office because of PRI control over voting in local communities.
"People have no memory," said Congressman Miguel Barbosa Huerta, of the left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party, known as the PRD.
"The reality of Mexican politics is the return of the `Salinato.' It's the revival of power for the privileged, the businessmen who became powerful and rich under Salinas," Barbosa said. "They are organizing for a presidential election they're determined to win."
The PRD, other parties and political insiders say Salinas helped the PRI nominate its congressional candidates, including negotiating alliances with other parties in districts where it crushed the PAN and PRD.
National PRI leader Roberto Madrazo, a Salinas friend often mentioned as presidential material, called the notion that Salinas had helped with the elections "science fiction."
PAN Congressman Luis Pazos de la Torre said his party also was suspicious about Salinas' return, fearing it could lead to a repeat of the violence of 1994, when PRI reformists and the old guard struggled for power.
In recent interviews, Salinas admitted he talks with Mexican leaders but revealed nothing of his plans.
Salinas was an economic reformer who privatized state-owned enterprises and expanded Mexico's economy, including championing the North American Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Canada and Mexico. Many view him as a brilliant politician.
"President Salinas will go down in history as the man who opened Mexico to the world," said former PRI Congressman Alfredo Phillips Olmedo, the former president of the Nadbank, which was created under NAFTA to help develop infrastructure along the U.S.-Mexico border. "Without him, that wouldn't have happened."
Salinas, a Harvard economics graduate, ruled from 1988 to 1994 after an election tainted by charges of fraud. Until 1994, he was hailed a reformist.
Jan. 4, 1994, would have been Salinas' crowning glory, as NAFTA went into effect. Instead, Maya rebels in the state of Chiapas emerged from jungles and demanded better living conditions, revealing Mexico's poverty to the world.
Then things worsened.
That March, PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was murdered. That September, Salinas' former brother-in-law and secretary-general of the PRI, Francisco Ruiz Massieu, also was killed. Salinas' older brother, Raul, was charged with masterminding the crime.
Ernesto Zedillo took office Dec.1, 1994. Weeks later, the peso collapsed. Foreign investors flew, inflation and interest rates rose. Thousands were unemployed.
Mexicans blamed Salinas, who blamed Zedillo. The two are still bitter enemies.
Salinas was corrupt, somehow perverse and not truly democratic. Yet, as for delivering the goodies, he was the best President Mexico has had during my lifetime.
With Salinas we had a country with a project, a leader that was able to overcome initial unpopularity, a man who knew when to follow the populace and when not to do it. He ended inflation, renegotiated debt, benefited the poor. For 5 years, he gave the country confidence and a sense of grandeur, and then, in 1994, his last year in office, everything went out of control and crumbled. The proud Concorde made a terrible landing. From the Zapatista rising to the assasinations of Colosio and Ruiz Massieu to, finally, "the mistake of December", a tremendous financial blow, when all the short-term foreign capital left the country.
President Zedillo blamed Salinas for "the mistake of December". He had left the economy hanging with pins. Zedillo's team took the pins off. A huge smear campaign fell against the former President, he became Mexico's favorite villain. Much of the corruption that oiled his presidency became public; notoriously, the privatization of banks, the favoritism towards some business tycoons and the kickbacks his brother received.
Zedillo's group lost the presidency against Fox. Zedillo was more of a democrat than Salinas, but he betrayed the man who put him into power, messed the economy badly (then managed to make it rise again, with the good help of Bill Clinton), and lacked decision.
The old ruling party, PRI, is split in two almost equally strong forces. The current leader, Madrazo, was always pro-Salinas and against Zedillo. But he's not in full control.
Salinas is still young for a politican. At 54, you can not say he's totally dead. But he's unpopular enough to never again leave the shadows.
I personally believe he's behind the Green-PRI alliance. And that he'll end up being the Green's puppetmaster. Not much more.
